THE LATE GREAT STATE OF ISRAEL: HOW ENEMIES WITHIN AND WITHOUT THREATEN THE JEWISH NATION'S SURVIVAL.
Aaron KleinWND Books, 223 pp., $25.95

This is a case in which the title says it all. Aaron Klein, a journalist based in Jerusalem, has a rather dark view of Israel's future if current leaders are allowed to continue with what he sees as failed policies.

Here's just one example: "Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction and hardly anyone has noticed."

In his view, there is much blame to go around. The news media presents a "warped picture" of reality, missing completely the danger of global jihad to Israeli and the rest of the West.

He says a gang of international politicians rules Israel and accuses them of being more interested in getting wealthy than protecting the Jewish state.

There's more of this throughout the book. If the sky-is-falling view of what's going on in Israel reflects your thinking, then Klein's book is a must. If you think there's a better way to pursue peace, there's no need to bother with it.

Michael Scheuer knows his subject, and so what he has to say about Osama bin Laden and the fight against Islamist terrorists is alarming. His bottom line: The influence of bin Laden and al Qaeda is spreading and the United States is not doing anything to slow it down -- let alone stop it.

The Afghan War is lost, he says, and the situation in Iraq isn't good either, despite what Washington says. Islamist militancy is marching across the globe, enlisting new recruits everywhere.

If you think the Obama administration is going to change all that, forget it.

In an updated introduction to this paperback version of his book, Scheuer says the wrong policies are continuing and he predicts that by January 2013 the United States will be in a "worse mess" than it is today. That's not very encouraging reading.

But Scheuer, a CIA veteran and former head of the agency's bin Laden Unit, knows what he's talking about. Somebody in Washington should listen.

The message of Juan Cole's new book is relatively simple: He wants the leaders of the West and the Muslim world to stop all the hate talk and make a concerted effort to understand each other. Cole quite correctly maintains that the distrust between what he calls the North Atlantic societies and the Muslim world have expanded exponentially in this century and it's time to stop all that.

He maintains that only through a shared trust can leaders work to resolve the challenges facing us.

His arguments are fairly persuasive and he lists a series of specific recommendations that must be taken to achieve the peace all sides claim to want.

Dealing with the more irrational aspects of America's anxiety over the Muslim world and the Islam anxiety over the West is the way to start.

His book was completed just before the Obama administration had a chance to get going. But judging from some of Cole's comments, he would probably believe the new president is heading in the right direction.

Charles Duelfer has no doubt that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed. The Bush administration, he contends, had the right idea about regime change but bumbled it.

In his book, Duelfer maintains the problem was ignorance -- especially on the part of the Department of Defense, which was "extraordinarily ignorant" of Iraq and how the country operated. The result was a disaster with lives unnecessarily lost.

In his rather bleak assessment of what went wrong, he notes that mistaken assumptions contributed to erroneous assessments. Those in Washington were incapable of even enunciating and implementing the Bush policy and yet somehow figured they knew how to restructure another country that they never came close to understanding.

Duelfer, who headed the team that searched for those non-existent weapons of mass destruction, knows what he's talking about. His book should be a caution to future leaders to know what they're doing before committing the nation to a war that will cost lives.

Around the world, the Israeli way of dealing with terrorism and protecting the populace is cited often as the way to go. Not so fast, says Ami Pedahzur in his detailed look at the Israeli security system and the methods that country's leaders have employed to combat terrorism.

He identifies four models: the war approach, which riles primarily on the military; the criminal justice option, which holds police responsible for stopping terrorists; the reconciliatory version, which relies on politicians and negotiations to achieve results; and the defensive model, which is aimed at protecting targets rather than attacking terrorists.

Israel, Pedahzur argues, has largely opted for the military approach and that generally has been a failure.

Pedahzur, who has the academic credentials to make his argument, dissects several terrorist incidents to make his point. His book is intended for those with more than a passing interest in how Israel deals with terrorism, but lessons learned from the Israeli experience could benefit all governments.

In the blogging world, the late 1990s is ancient history.
So ancient, author Scott Rosenberg can only paint a hazy picture of exactly how and why the first blogs were created near the end of the last decade.

In his new book, Rosenberg takes on the nearly impossible task of trying to cobble together a history of the messy, sprawling world of blogging. How did a smattering of people keeping online diaries one day turn into 133 million blogs practically overnight?

Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, does a noble job of wading through a decade of blogs and bloggers to piece together a coherent story line. He starts with pioneering Silicon Valley tech workers in the 1990s who were experimenting with writing mostly forgettable weblogs, or online diaries.

The book also chronicles the ongoing battle between upstart bloggers and traditional journalists, who dismissed blogs early on only to see their struggling newspapers desperately trying to embrace blogging techniques to stay afloat.

But, ultimately, Rosenberg's book suffers from the same problems as blogging itself: It's too fragmented, too disconnected, too meandering. The book also can't help but feel a little stale compared to the fast-moving online world it chronicles. Rosenberg only briefly touches on Twitter, Facebook and the other social media that have overtaken blogging as the next big thing.
But, in the end, he rightly concludes blogging can't be ignored. "Blogging allows us
to think out loud together," he writes. "Now that we have begun, it's impossible to imagine stopping."

Kelly Heyboer is a Star-Ledger reporter who blogs at Jersey Blogs (www.nj.com/jerseyblogs) and NJ Voices (www.nj.com/jerseyvoices).

A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF LEHMAN BROTHERS
Lawrence G. McDonald
Crown, 384 pp., $27

Lawrence G. McDonald's narrative unfolds like gossip exchanged at the office water cooler -- or perhaps more like statements made under oath at a pretrial deposition. At times, this book is both, and McDonald handles it well.

His gripping account, co-written with Patrick Robinson, is that of an insider, rather than an investigative journalist, which is what makes it an absorbing cover-to-cover read.

McDonald was a senior vice-president, and his on-the-scenes presence and gossipy style is what gives the book its authenticity. According to him, leverage problems were identified within

Lehman as early as 2005. He lays the blame for the firm's downfall at the feet of Chairman/CEO Richard S. Fuld Jr.and Lehman President Joseph M. Gregory, portraying both men as ostriches blissfully ignoring the facts.

According to McDonald, Fuld and Gregory disregarded repeated warnings from qualified people within the firm that they were headed for disaster with their continued embrace of illusionary
real estate profits.

He portrays their stewardship of the company as nothing more than egotistical, self-absorbed, shortsighted greed. Many in the financial world knew the real estate market was reaching unsustainable levels. Yet Lehman's top executives, Fuld and Gregory, were on their way to borrowing and leveraging the firm to more than 40 times its value in pursuit of more and more commercial and residential real estate profits, which already were at the top of the market.

After reading this book, one has to come away with the questions: How could super-smart men screw up so badly? And, more pointedly, where were the government regulatory agencies during all this?
Peter Howard, who worked briefly for Lehman in the late '80s, is a freelance reviewer from Livingston.